- 1 - ALL THIS WORK MUST BE DONE IN A COMPOSITION BOOK!!!!!!! Please pay attention to this rule-you will lose points for not following it! 2018 AP Language and Composition Summer Reading Assignment Dialectical Response Journal and Commonplace Analysis 1. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Dialectical means “the art or practice of arriving at the truth by engaging in conversation involving question and answer.” For this summer assignment, you will complete dialectical journals for THIS novel to aid in your understanding of the story as you read it, and to demonstrate that understanding to Ms. Howitt. Through these journals, you are essentially having a “conversation” with the text (jotting down ideas, insights, questions, and thoughts) and with yourself. Your goal is to make notes about points you think are significant, profound, noteworthy, ironic, emotional, rhetorical, etc. Write down reactions as they occur to you, and as long as they are honest, you can not be wrong. Be prepared to hand-in these completed composition books in the first few days of school. YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST 3 QUOTES FOR EVERY CHAPTER OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Read the attached article before reading the novel and be prepared to discuss it in class. How to create a dialectical response journal: (example following the whole assignment) • Draw a vertical line in the middle of each page of your comp. book • At the top of the left column, write “Quotes from Text.” At the top of the right column, write “My Commentary.” You don’t have to label these every page, but you should every 10 or so. • As you read each chapter, complete the specified number of quotations. Put these, along with the page number in parentheses, in the LEFT column. • In the RIGHT column, write down your response to that quote. This should be thoughtful, insightful, and mature. Try to focus your reading and responses to literary qualities such as tone, organization, diction, syntax, symbolism, allusion, irony, theme, etc. Though you are not restricted to these devices…if you feel it has significance, respond to it…this is YOUR “conversation!” Try to be as specific as possible in your observations. You are not just paraphrasing or summarizing-you are conversing with the quotes. Here are a few suggestions: • Make a judgment about the character’s actions. • Look at the character’s behavior based on his/her era • Analyze the author’s organization and its effect on the purpose • Explore the use of specific language • Discuss the author’s tone toward various themes or characters • Connect parts of the novel to modern circumstances • Compare/contrast a character to other literary characters • Show your understanding of the thematic significance • Discuss the archetypal qualities of characters or themes - 2 - IN THE SAME COMPOSITION BOOK, DO THE FOLLOWING: Toward the end of the summer, you will collect three news articles about the same controversial topic (these topics are considered “commonplace” topics of which everyone is aware,) from major newspapers, news magazines, or news websites. Dates for these articles should be relatively close to one another. Try to vary your news sources to reflect a variety of political perspectives and rhetoric: use Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Fox News online, MSNBC online, ETC. (there are many others!!) At least one of these articles--preferably more than one--will be an Op-Ed piece.* For each article, you will complete a Work Data Sheet, which should be written in paragraph form by answering the questions/providing the information. Print-out or cut-out the articles, fold them, and put them in the back of your composition book. Since all three articles must be about the same topic, choose a topic that is likely to remain in the news at least until August, and one about which you have a personal opinion. *’Op-Ed’ means ‘opposite the editorial page’ and refers specifically to short pieces in which the writer, usually either an employee of the newspaper itself or an expert on the subject being discussed, shares his or her opinion, commentary or analysis on a current topic in the news. These pieces can be found in any prominent newspaper. They are not ‘Letters to the Editor.’ I am not going to suggest topics because I want you to choose one without direction. You should choose one that is relevant, recent, and controversial. The point of this lesson is to see how different sources “spin” information for their own purpose, thus if you only read one source, you only get the story they want you to know. This lesson is essential for this class. WORK DATA SHEET INFORMATION SOURCE: Tell the title (in quotation marks,) the source (underlined) and the author, if named. INTENDED AUDIENCE: Who is the writer speaking to and why? (what audience does this source “cater” to?) SUBJECT/CONTENT/PURPOSE: Summarize the content, including relevant information that is necessary for full understanding. What is the author’s intent or purpose? Is the author trying to convince the reader of something, or simply inform? MEMORABLE QUOTE: Find and record the central claim or hypothesis (thesis) of the article. SIGNIFICANCE of OPENING/CLOSING STATEMENT: Discuss what the author hopes to achieve with these statements: shock? disgust? enthusiasm? relief? Is your opinion swayed by the piece? Why? Sample of dialectical journal from To Kill a Mockingbird (for the first assignment/Huck Finn) Quotes from Text My Commentary “People generally see what they look for and hear Atticus tells the kids this to help explain the what they listen for” inexplicable prejudice of the townspeople. This ironic fact, which has a sarcastic tone to it, shows how stubborn people can be and how they can’t recognize when things are wrong just because they don’t want to. - - 3 - - Thursday, Jul. 03, 2008 Getting Past Black and White By Stephen L. Carter Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. It might even be fair to call him the inventor of the American short story. And he surely deserves an additional encomium: the man who popularized the sophisticated literary attack on racism. I say sophisticated because antislavery fiction--some of it by former slaves--had been a staple of the years before the Civil War. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain melded his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story. Twain was born in Missouri, a slave state, and fought in the Civil War, however briefly, on the Confederate side. His father occasionally owned a slave, and some members of his family owned many more. But Twain emerged as a man whose racial attitudes were not what one might expect from someone of his background. Again and again, in the postwar years, he seemed compelled to tackle the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain's novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books, according to the American Library Association, have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain's most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as coarse. Twain himself wrote that the book's banners considered the novel "trash and suitable only for the slums." More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave whose adventures twine with Huck's, and its frequent use of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often excoriated, never appears in it.) But the attacks were and are silly--and miss the point. The novel is profoundly antislavery. Jim's search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As the Twain scholar Jocelyn Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction--a recognition that the slave had two personalities, "the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man." There is much more. Twain's mystery novel Pudd'nhead Wilson--aside from being one of the earliest stories to hinge on the evidence of fingerprints--stood as a challenge to the racial convictions of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intellect, Twain's tale revolved in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master's baby and, concerned lest the child be sold South, switched him in the crib for the master's baby by his wife. The slave's light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slaveholding class. The master's wife's baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave. The thrust was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice--manner of speech, for example--were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery imposed on its victims. At the same time, he was well aware of the possibility that the oppressed might eke out moments of joy amid their sorrows. This was the subject matter of a sprightly little tale titled A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, published in the 1870s.